Automated vehicle washing systems have been available for many years to automatically wash and dry vehicles. Large volume vehicle washing systems typically include a conveyer for moving a vehicle through a series of washing and rinsing stations, and finally, through a drying station, which serves to remove moisture from the exterior surface of the vehicle. Other systems, known as roll-overs, exist for washing and drying vehicles where the vehicle remains stationary and the machine moves over the vehicle to perform the washing, rinsing, and drying steps.
A variety of different types of drying stations have been employed to remove water from the exterior of the vehicle. One such drying station employs one or more dryers, which each include one or more nozzles. In these drying stations, the vehicle passes by the dryers, which emit high velocity air onto the vehicle, to blow water off the vehicle exterior. The dryers can take on various different configurations, can be placed in different locations, and can be oriented in a variety of different ways all to blow water off the vehicle exterior. Additionally, the dryers can be either stationary or oscillating. Regardless of the configuration, orientation, number of dryers or their movement, they suffer from a number of disadvantages, the foremost of which is that a significant amount of water remains on the vehicle exterior after the drying cycle is finished. Recognizing this deficiency, vehicle wash facilities often have excess water manually removed from the vehicle exterior, such as with hand towels as the vehicle leaves the wash facility. This increases the cost to the operator as a result of more labor requirements as well as additional expense associated with having clean hand towels available.
As a potential solution to this problem, friction drying stations have also been employed either in connection with or in place of the touch-less drying systems discussed above. These stations generally consist of a rotating wheel having a drying material affixed to a rotating shaft. As the shaft rotates, the drying material also rotates and contacts the vehicle exterior to absorb and wipe away water. The drying material typically consists of an artificial leather, shammy, or a very thick fast absorbing synthetic material. Vehicle washes have utilized these drying materials to “wipe cars dry” after the car has passed under the forced air dryers. These friction drying stations did not solve the insufficient drying problem for a couple of reasons.
One reason that these friction drying stations did not work sufficiently, is that the drying material would become oversaturated after a relatively short period of time. When this occurred, the drying station became ineffective since the drying material could not remove any more water from the vehicle exterior. Additionally, when the drying station was used to dry multiple cars in succession, the drying material could not dry quick enough to remove a sufficient amount of water. Thus, after drying only a few cars, the problem of insufficient drying remained. Moreover, as the drying material absorbed more water, more energy was required to rotate the wheel, which increased the cost to run the wash system.
A second deficiency with these prior drying machines is that the drying material for these friction drying systems can quickly become contaminated with dirt. Thus, while the drying machine is supposed to be wiping cars clean through the contact of the drying material with the vehicle exterior, once the drying material becomes contaminated with dirt, the dirt will be transferred back onto the vehicle and can even scratch the vehicle surface. The previously accepted solution to this later problem was to have two sets of drying material. When the first set became contaminated through use, the second set would be substituted therefore while the first set was washed and cleaned. This solution was expensive and required constant labor and attention to not only clean the drying material, but swap the sets of drying material.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a drying station for a vehicle washing system that overcomes these disadvantages.